Hell's Silencing: Forsaken Innocence

Flora looked at the key. It had a tag...labeled 'past'? The fuck? She ran out of the room with key in mouth and...into another room. There was a fire place, but the fire had long since died out. The lantern's glow revealed a vast assortment of severed heads on shelves and they were labeled by hair and eye color.

Another stench hit her shortly afterwards, but with it came....more feminine sobbing?

Flora had the uneasy feeling that she somehow recognized this room. Before she knew it, a music box began playing from a door at the end of this brief, wide hallway.

The town was fucking with her again. Wasn't it?

She sighed and...felt something stretch along her sides. She craned her head and gaped.

Bat-like wings with feathers arranged in such a way the bat portion looked like it was growing out of bird's wings now decorated her sides. These feathers were black. What's more, her backside was now covered in golden plating. She moved her wings out of the way to examine her ribs. A darker shade of gold greeted her. It was then she noticed that her hooves....no, a good portion of all four legs had holes. She felt something wet on her lower lips, so she took out the Hellish Knife and looked at her reflection.

Fangs. Sticking out from her upper lip. Sharp and not to mention vampiric in an eerie way.

The sobbing continued, yet there was no static. Her heart was beating a mile a minute now. She looked at her reflection again.

Now, her ears were longer, thinner, and lay flat against her head as if they'd always been that way. She twitched them and saw they could be upright like normal, so that was good.

Her snow-white pelt was now replaced with black, bug-like skin. Her mane had become such that it looked like there were holes in it, and her tail was the same way. She tried moving a hoof along her mangy mess that sat on her head and was relieved that the hair could act normal. Failing to notice holes in the bat membrane of her wings, she froze.

The Knife was dropped to the floor as the key flew into the lock by itself and cracked the lock.

The door opened on its own accord. Something was moving just out of the light's reach, but Flora could see it nonetheless. She put the Knife away, seeing no need for it now.

She slowly trotted over to the other creature and gaped. The creature had a longer mane, a short, sharp horn, wings attached to the wall by meat hooks...these wings were covered in bloody white feathers. This mare's hooves were chained and so was her neck, and she shared the same, mangy appearance as Flora, save for the lack of holes, bat, contorted horn, and black skin.

The other mare's right hoof grabbed Flora's left hoof and held on tight. She looked up at her doppelganger with teary eyes--or rather, a teary eye and half a bleeding, swelling face where the right eye should've been. The small horn was giving off sparks of fire.

"You're becoming a monster..." She heaved with flattened ears as tears fell from her good eye.

Flora was speechless, and tears fell from her own eyes as she looked at her look-alike.

"You can't be saved now..." Sobbed the other mare. "I'm you when it was almost a year ago...."

"Yes, I can be saved. I'll find a way even if it's with my dying breath." Retorted Flora, tears still falling from her eyes.

"You don't understand--you're cursed!!" Shouted the injured, sobbing mare before she fell limp, her hoof letting go of Flora's own.

Flora looked at her younger self. As she cried, she felt herself...becoming empty inside. But why?

She blinked. She stood in the hallway she left while going into the Lounge. Checking her hoof and sighing when she saw it still had holes dotting its mass, she wanted to ask herself who and what she really was. She began to doubt herself--was she really human as her parents said, or was she...something more?

She looked down to the floor and saw a music box. Using telekinesis, she lifted it to her face to examine it.

There was....what looked like an incubus demon in a tuxedo attacking a bride that....?

Flora's face twisted in shock. Last time she checked, she didn't get married to anybody. The bride looked so much like her though. It confused her, and in a sick way. And besides, the terrified look on the bride's face indicated hell to come.

Weren't weddings supposed to be--oh, wait, she'd went online and read about the horrors of Saudi Arabia. A place she'd never visit unless one of two things happened: One, all women and female children got equal rights, effective right then and there, or two, the women and children were evacuated and all the men killed each other in fits of fury.

Inequality was the reason she hated and would never convert to Islam even if held at gunpoint by rapists who affiliated with the religion thereof. She was sure there were decent Muslim males out and about, but were sadly almost entirely washed out by the bad ones. Damn the Taliban, damn Al-Qaeda, d--she stopped herself from using the F-word.

Shaking her head and regaining her focus, she put the creepy-as-all-hell music box into her book-bag along with the rest of her inventory. Spreading her odd wings before slamming them shut against her body, she suddenly and understandably got the urge to fly. But the hallway she was in was much too cramped--her wings spread out to it's length, for fuck's sake!

Soon enough, she was back in the snow-laden streets of town. She heard more cackling as the static came.

Nope, she wasn't going to fight another one of those monsters--at least, not in close quarters.

More cackling voices sounded. Flora drew her Knife and sharpened it on the road itself, because fuck the road! Spreading her wings once more, she grinned as she saw at least four more of those flying monsters.

"Alright, you fucking Jesters! Come on over here and get a piece of me, I DARE YOU!" Flora bellowed as she took flight and lunged at the Jester that was suddenly right in front of her.